Nabil

“We were discussing a subject that was quite prominent at the time, the trend for lesbian biological mothers to use the absence of legal relationship recognition to deny custody to former female partners who had fully participated in raising a child. We were discussing the cruelty to the former partner and to the child, the vindictiveness, the destruction of the community, the endless longing and irresolution that it produces, and I asked Kendell how these women justified these actions. “It’s the cadre of friends,” she said. This insight has stayed with me ever since. There is often a “cadre” of bad friends around a person encouraging them to do things that are morally wrong, unjustified, and unethical,”
― Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

“This is because the caress is not a simple stroking; it is a shaping.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

“What I mean is that, if a lot of queer energy, say around adolescence, goes into what Barthes calls “le vouloir-être-intelligent” (as in “If I have to be miserable, at least let me be brainier than everybody else”), accounting in large part for paranoia’s enormous prestige as the very signature of smartness (a smartness that smarts), a lot of queer energy, later on, goes into … practices aimed at taking the terror out of error, at making the making of mistakes sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful. Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?25”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

“You forget what it was like. You'd swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place